Roche Acquires Genomics Research Company CAPP Medical

Roche has acquired a Stanford University-founded genomics research company, CAPP Medical, in an effort to strengthen its oncology translational research pipeline.

The company announced today that it has acquired CAPP Medical to advance the development of technology for cancer screening and monitoring through the detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in the blood. CAPP Medical, founded in 2013 by Stanford oncologists and industry veterans, has novel technology designed to isolate and quantify small amounts of ctDNA through a simple blood draw, which has the potential to be used for cancer therapy selection and monitoring tumor response and resistance in therapy.

“This acquisition highlights Roche’s commitment to advancing cancer testing,” said CAPP Medical’s CEO Ashok Krishnamurthi. “We strongly believe Roche is the best suited company to advance this technology and bring it to its full potential.”

The companies did not disclose financial details of the deal.

CAPP Medical’s technology allows for sensitivity and specificity without the need for patient specific optimizations. At the core of the company’s technology is the assay design and the bioinformatics that allow for the detection of multiple mutations with a single assay. According to the company, this results in rapid cancer detection technology that may provide actionable results to clinicians, accelerate oncology drug development, is complimentary to existing modalities and is cost effective and scalable.

“Roche believes focused and high quality next generation sequencing (NGS) assays using simple blood draws have the potential to significantly advance the time of cancer diagnosis and change routine cancer diagnostic monitoring and may be highly cost effective compared to today’s current standard of using PET and CT imaging to monitor tumor progression,” said Roland Diggelmann, COO, Roche Diagnostics. “CAPP Medical’s technology for detecting the circulating cancer DNA from the blood has the potential to further strengthen Roche’s diagnostic offerings for patients and will provide valuable clinical trial support for Pharma oncology pipelines.”